Breakfast muffins

I have to admit it has been an extraordinary start to the new year and I could not have been happier with how things have shaped up. More on that a little later.

For now, I want to share a quick and easy recipe for breakfast muffins I had been working on recently. This version is so simple you would want to have muffins to begin your day every day.

Ingredients for six muffins:

1 cup plain old flour

Half a cup of caster sugar

1 teaspoon of baking powder

A teeny weeny pinch of baking soda

1 egg, the yolk separated from the white (use a small plastic bottle for the separation)

Another good pinch of salt

Half a cup of whole milk (nope, skim milk ain’t gonna cut it!)

1 teaspoon vanilla extract (essence will do just fine)

A fourth of a cup of melted butter

It all begins by sifting your dry ingredients into a fairly large bowl. Create a hole in the middle and get on with the wet items.

Separate the yolk from the white, and shift it into another bowl. Add the milk first and then the melted butter. This will stop the yolk from cooking. Whisk to combine.

Now pour the wet ingredients into the dry bit by bit. Combine everything till it’s smooth but not lumpy. If you think the mix is too thick, add a couple tablespoons of milk.

Using an electric beater, beat the hell out of the egg white till you reach soft peaks (I did it by hand; makes a great workout). Gently fold the beaten white into the batter mix. Use a spatula for this process. You need to be very careful so as to not beat the air out of the egg white.

Brush a six-scoop muffin tray with butter and dust with flour. I had the silicon ones, so I skipped that step. Future advice for all bakers: get silicon baking trays, muffin holders, baking sheets, etc. Silicon rules! And so does Silicon Valley the show!

In a preheated oven, set the muffins in to bake for 25 mins at 200 degrees Celsius until an inserted toothpick comes out clean. Then crank up the oven to the maximum temperate and set the muffins on the uppermost shelf to brown the tops slightly. Keep a watchful eye on this step; the muffins may go black in no time.

After you have coloured them to your liking, remove them from the holds and transfer to a wire rack or a plate to cool, before pasting with any icing/frosting of your choice. You could eat them straight away too!

I added a handful of blueberries to my mixture before I added the egg white and finished them off with a salted chocolate frosting. You could go for anything you prefer: cherries, dry fruits, desiccated coconut, strawberries, mango! The base recipe does not change. Just make sure to add only a handful and not more.

There it is! A manageable recipe to make any breakfast extraordinary. Happy cooking.